Colonial breeding impacts potentially fitness-relevant cognitive processes in barn swallows
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):15. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01841-1.ABSTRACTMany animals breed colonially, often in dense clusters, representing a complex social environment with cognitive demands that could ultimately impact individual fitness. However, the effects of social breeding on the evolution of cognitive processes remain largely unknown. We tested the hypothesis that facultative colonial breeding influences attention and decision-making. Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) breed in solitary pairs or in a range of colony sizes, up to dozens of pairs. We tested for selective attention to social information with playbacks o...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Angela Medina-Garc ía Ellen Scherner Molly T McDermott Mark E Hauber Rebecca J Safran Source Type: research
Spatial working memory in a disappearing object task is impaired in female but not male dogs with chronic osteoarthritis
This study compared the performance of 20 dogs with chronic pain from osteoarthritis and 21 healthy control dogs in a disappearing object task of spatial working memory. Female neutered osteoarthritic dogs, but not male neutered osteoarthritic dogs, were found to have lower predicted probabilities of successfully performing the task compared to control dogs of the same sex. In addition, as memory retention interval in the task increased, osteoarthritic dogs showed a steeper decline in working memory performance than control dogs. This suggests that the effects of osteoarthritis, and potentially other pain-related condition...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Melissa Smith Joanna C Murrell Michael Mendl Source Type: research
The irreconcilability of insight
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):16. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01844-y.ABSTRACTWe are said to experience insight when we suddenly and unexpectedly become aware of the solution to a problem that we previously took ourselves to be unable to solve. In the field of comparative cognition, there is rising interest in the question of whether non-human animals are capable of insightful problem-solving. Putative cases of animals demonstrating insight have generally attracted two types of criticism: first, that insight is being conflated with other cognitive capacities (e.g., causal cognition, or mental trial and error); and, second, that ...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Eli Shupe Source Type: research
Auditory risk recognition is socially transmitted across territory borders in wild birds
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):19. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01858-6.ABSTRACTPrey species commonly assess predation risk based on acoustic signals, such as predator vocalizations or heterospecific alarm calls. The resulting risk-sensitive decision-making affects not only the behavior and life-history of individual prey, but also has far-reaching ecological consequences for population, community, and ecosystem dynamics. Although auditory risk recognition is ubiquitous in animals, it remains unclear how individuals gain the ability to recognize specific sounds as cues of a threat. Here, it has been shown that free-living birds (W...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Jakub Szymkowiak Source Type: research
Many faces of dominance: the manifestation of cohabiting companion dogs' rank in competitive and non-competitive scenarios
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):12. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01842-0.ABSTRACTThere are indications that companion dogs of multi-dog households form a hierarchy, maintained by formal and agonistic dominance. Although it was found that the behaviour of dogs depends on their rank in several contexts, so far, the assessment of their rank itself has been based on owner-completed questionnaires. With this research we endeavoured to find associations between rank scores from the Dog Rank Assessment Questionnaire (DRA-Q) and cohabiting dogs' behaviour in a competitive test (Toy Possession test-32 dog pairs) and a non-competitive, citiz...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Kata V ékony P éter Pongrácz Source Type: research
Personality and cognition: shoal size discrimination performance is related to boldness and sociability among ten freshwater fish species
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):6. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01837-x.ABSTRACTSeveral studies have reported that animals' personalities are often correlated with individual differences in cognition. Here, we tested whether personality is related to cognition across species, focusing on 10 freshwater fishes and a task relevant for fitness, the ability to discriminate shoal size. Bolder species exhibited more 'shuttle' behavior for information sampling during shoal selection and showed high performance (HP) in the numerical discrimination than shyer species, i.e., low performance (LP) species. Species at both the high and low ends ...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Shi-Jian Fu Na Zhang Jie Fan Source Type: research
Chunking as a function of sequence length
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01835-z. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTChunking mechanisms are central to several cognitive processes. During the acquisition of visuo-motor sequences, it is commonly reported that these sequences are segmented into chunks leading to more fluid, rapid, and accurate performances. The question of a chunk's storage capacity has been often investigated but little is known about the dynamics of chunk size evolution relative to sequence length. In two experiments, we studied the dynamics and the evolution of a sequence's chunking pattern as a function of sequence length in a non-hum...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Laure Tosatto Jo ël Fagot Dezso Nemeth Arnaud Rey Source Type: research
Cognitive flexibility in urban yellow mongooses, Cynictis penicillata
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):14. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01839-9.ABSTRACTCognitive flexibility enables animals to alter their behaviour and respond appropriately to environmental changes. Such flexibility is important in urban settings where environmental changes occur rapidly and continually. We studied whether free-living, urban-dwelling yellow mongooses, Cynictis penicillata, in South Africa, are cognitively flexible in reversal learning and attention task experiments (n = 10). Reversal learning was conducted using two puzzle boxes that were distinct visually and spatially, each containing a preferred or non-preferred fo...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Mijke M üller Neville Pillay Source Type: research
Do domestic budgerigars perceive predation risk?
In this study, we tested whether domestic budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) perceived predation risk after the presentation of specimens and sounds of sparrowhawks (Accipiter nisus), domestic cats (Felis catus), and humans, and whether this in turn influenced their feeding behavior. When exposed to visual or acoustic stimuli, budgerigars showed significantly longer latency to feed under sparrowhawk, domestic cat, and human treatments than with controls. Budgerigars responded more strongly to acoustic stimuli than visual stimuli, and they showed the longest latency to feed and the least number of feeding times in respon...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Chang Wang Xueqi Zhao Baodan Tao Jiaqi Peng Haitao Wang Jiangping Yu Longru Jin Source Type: research
How do animals weigh conflicting information about reward sources over time? Comparing dynamic averaging models
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):11. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01840-2.ABSTRACTOptimal foraging theory suggests that animals make decisions which maximize their food intake per unit time when foraging, but the mechanisms animals use to track the value of behavioral alternatives and choose between them remain unclear. Several models for how animals integrate past experience have been suggested. However, these models make differential predictions for the occurrence of spontaneous recovery of choice: a behavioral phenomenon in which a hiatus from the experimental environment results in animals reverting to a behavioral allocation co...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Jack Van Allsburg Timothy A Shahan Source Type: research
Choosing the best way: how wild common marmosets travel to efficiently exploit resources
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):20. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01864-8.ABSTRACTWhile foraging, animals have to find potential food sites, remember these sites, and plan the best navigation route. To deal with problems associated with foraging for multiple and patchy resources, primates may employ heuristic strategies to improve foraging success. Until now, no study has attempted to investigate experimentally the use of such strategies by a primate in a context involving foraging in large-scale space. Thus, we carried out an experimental field study that aimed to test if wild common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) employ heuristic ...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: D êverton Plácido Xavier Filipa Abreu Antonio Souto Nicola Schiel Source Type: research
On the value of advanced information about delayed rewards
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):10. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01856-8.ABSTRACTIn a variety of laboratory preparations, several animal species prefer signaled over unsignaled outcomes. Here we examine whether pigeons prefer options that signal the delay to reward over options that do not and how this preference changes with the ratio of the delays. We offered pigeons repeated choices between two alternatives leading to a short or a long delay to reward. For one alternative (informative), the short and long delays were reliably signaled by different stimuli (e.g., SS for short delays, SL for long delays). For the other (non-inform...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Alejandro Mac ías Armando Machado Marco Vasconcelos Source Type: research
Responses to novelty in wild insular birds: comparing breeding populations in ecologically contrasting habitats
In this study, we presented novel objects to two geographically isolated breeding populations of the black-faced sheathbill (Chionis minor), a sedentary land-based bird that frequents remote sub-Antarctic islands. In the first population (Chionis minor ssp. crozettensis), the "Crozet group" (Baie du Marin, Ile de la Possession, Crozet Islands), breeding pairs inhabit a variable habitat close to penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus) colonies. In the second population (Chionis minor ssp. minor), the "Kerguelen group" (île Verte, Morbihan gulf, Kerguelen Islands) breeding pairs live in penguin-free territories. In this latter po...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Samara Danel Nancy Rebout L éna Bureau Timoth ée Zidat Dora Biro Francesco Bonadonna Source Type: research
Recognizing structure in novel tunes: differences between human and rats
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):17. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01848-8.ABSTRACTA central feature in music is the hierarchical organization of its components. Musical pieces are not a simple concatenation of chords, but are characterized by rhythmic and harmonic structures. Here, we explore if sensitivity to music structure might emerge in the absence of any experience with musical stimuli. For this, we tested if rats detect the difference between structured and unstructured musical excerpts and compared their performance with that of humans. Structured melodies were excerpts of Mozart's sonatas. Unstructured melodies were created...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Paola Crespo-Bojorque Elodie Cauvet Christophe Pallier Juan M Toro Source Type: research
The proximate regulation of prosocial behaviour: towards a conceptual framework for comparative research
Anim Cogn. 2024 Mar 2;27(1):5. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01846-w.ABSTRACTHumans and many other animal species act in ways that benefit others. Such prosocial behaviour has been studied extensively across a range of disciplines over the last decades, but findings to date have led to conflicting conclusions about prosociality across and even within species. Here, we present a conceptual framework to study the proximate regulation of prosocial behaviour in humans, non-human primates and potentially other animals. We build on psychological definitions of prosociality and spell out three key features that need to be in place for ...
Source: Animal Cognition - March 1, 2024 Category: Zoology Authors: Kathrin S Kopp Patricia Kanngiesser Rahel K Br ügger Moritz M Daum Anja Gampe Moritz K öster Carel P van Schaik Katja Liebal Judith M Burkart Source Type: research
